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An Overview; The Wen Ho Lee Case

With the public testimony of Attorney General Janet Reno and Louis Freeh, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on Tuesday, the Wen Ho Lee case entered a new phase. It is now possible to see for the first time in a full public accounting the outlines of the government's case against Dr. Lee, the former government scientist who pleaded guilty to mishandling classified materials. That case is sobering in its account of Dr. Lee's pattern of suspicious and ultimately illegal activities, though not conclusive on the question of how the Chinese government made its undisputed gains in nuclear weapons technology. But in the wake of Tuesday's joint session of the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence committees, any assessment of the national security and civil liberties aspects of the case -- and the continuing journalistic debate about coverage of the case -- can begin by evaluating Mr. Freeh's presentation.

That Dr. Lee grossly and consistently mishandled classified material beginning in 1993 seems beyond reasonable dispute. He pleaded guilty to that specific charge. Mr. Freeh's account paints a picture of an individual purposefully and repeatedly overriding the classification system on computers at the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory. For the F.B.I. and Department of Energy not to react to Dr. Lee's declassifying and copying of 470 nuclear weapons files and his repeated efforts to make unauthorized entries into the laboratory's X Division would have been a dereliction of duty.

The Government's Case

Mr. Freeh's account was the equivalent of a prosecutor's opening statement to the jury. It provides a picture of the government's worst-case scenario, delivered at a time when both Mr. Freeh and Ms. Reno are under sharp attack for mismanaging the case. It must be tested in the days ahead to see if it is accurate and whether there are mitigating or exculpatory explanations. Some questions may be answered by Dr. Lee in the presence of federal agents under the conditions of his plea bargain -- a process that will initially be far from public view. But this is how we would frame those questions on the basis of the record to date, as amplified by the Senate hearing on Tuesday.

The primary question is what Dr. Lee did with the seven computer tapes still missing from the 10 he originally made, and also what he did with the additional copies that his attorneys informed the government about just before the plea agreement hearing. Mr. Freeh and Ms. Reno said the government had reduced their 59-count indictment to the one plea bargain in court because of the compelling national interest in getting Dr. Lee's cooperation in locating those tapes.

As ominous as that sounds, it has to be analyzed in light of other information given to the committee on Tuesday when it comes to looking at Dr. Lee's motives and whether the information he downloaded was available in open sources. Senator Richard Bryan, a Democratic member of the Intelligence Committee, took a measured approach. On the question of whether a leak from Los Alamos might have aided China in its development of new warheads, Mr. Bryan correctly observed that classified information on the critical American W-88 warhead existed in 546 government and industry offices other than Los Alamos. Mr. Freeh conceded that the government had ''no direct evidence that Dr. Lee passed classified information to a foreign government.'' There is less clarity on Dr. Lee's purpose in copying sensitive data in recent years. The committee in its closed sessions and in the upcoming interrogations of Dr. Lee by federal intelligence and law enforcement agents must explore why he engaged in a mystifying binge of copying classified material and then, once the F.B.I. got on his trail, deleted 310 files in a single day in an apparent attempt to hide what he had done.

These issues lead to the related and critical national security question of how much of the information collected by Dr. Lee was available outside the lab as unclassified information that the Chinese could have gotten by clever research. On this question, experts remain divided. Dr. Lee's defenders, including some scientific colleagues, have maintained that the material he transferred would not be greatly useful to a foreign power and that the bulk of what he copied was available from open sources. The senators heard testimony from T. J. Glauthier, a deputy secretary of energy, that while discrete scientific and mathematical models were not classified, the way to assemble them into weapons was highly secret. In an interview with The Times, John L. Richter, a weapons designer who had earlier testified for Dr. Lee, accepted the government's definition as to the sensitivity of some of the underlying information. But Dr. Richter said he still believed that the government had exaggerated the significance of the material. Clearly, the Senate Intelligence Committee will have to determine just how critical the downloaded information is.

Let us turn now to the civil liberties aspects of the case. While taking a grave view of Dr. Lee's activities, Senator Bryan spoke out sharply about a ''Keystone Kops'' investigation. Others raised the question whether Dr. Lee had been the target of racial profiling, and Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania asked whether Dr. Lee had been shackled and denied bail as part of a regimen of ''pressures to compel a guilty plea.'' Mr. Freeh and Ms. Reno denied that Dr. Lee's Asian descent had played a role in his prosecution. Even so, the treatment of Dr. Lee after his indictment on Dec. 10, 1999, was unnecessarily harsh, and the government used false testimony to persuade Federal District Judge James A. Parker to hold Dr. Lee for nine months without bail.

President Clinton, commenting on the case on Sept. 15, got the balance about right in concluding that Dr. Lee had pleaded guilty to ''a very serious national security violation,'' while also expressing concern about the denial of bail as fundamentally offensive to normal legal practice. On the same day, Joe Lockhart, the White House press secretary, complained at his daily briefing that ''near-hysterical investigative reporting'' had created a crisis atmosphere around the issue of nuclear weapons security. His deputy, Jake Siewert, condemned this page for not having given the administration due credit for security efforts. That brings us to the journalistic issues raised by the Lee case and the subject of security at the nuclear weapons laboratories at Los Alamos, Sandia and Livermore.

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The official and journalistic records are replete with convincing evidence that a lax security culture has long prevailed at those institutions, and senior administration officials continue to confirm that those laboratories are the subject of continuing corrective action and attendant morale problems. The Times's news department has been in the forefront of investigative journalism on weapons security, technology transfers to China and the Lee case. Earlier this week, our colleagues in the news department published a lengthy note from the editors reviewing the paper's coverage. The critique affirms The Times's news department's commitment to vigorous, timely reporting and to fairness as an active principle.

On this as on many other issues, this page has had its critics, too. That is a constant of opinion journalism. In the spirit of self-examination, we have reviewed the editorials we published over 17 months about the Lee case and the need for stronger security procedures at the nuclear laboratories. Many of the main arguments have held up well, although with the benefit of hindsight we find that we too quickly accepted the government's theory that espionage was the main reason for Chinese nuclear advances and its view that Dr. Lee had been properly singled out as the prime suspect.

Nevertheless, we remain convinced of the need for the newly created National Nuclear Security Administration to take over supervision of the laboratories from the Department of Energy. We continue to believe that Republican demands for the resignations of Bill Richardson, the energy secretary, and Samuel R. Berger, the president's national security adviser, were premature. But in retrospect we may have been overly sharp in comments about Mr. Berger's fitness for his job and about Ms. Reno's refusal to issue a wiretap order on Dr. Lee. In analyzing potential sources of technology transfers to China, we rightly identified commercial espionage as a possible source, but we may turn out to have been premature in concluding that the critical expertise on miniaturization of warheads was ''most likely'' stolen from computers at the weapons laboratories.

More than 14 months ago -- four months before Dr. Lee was indicted, but five months after the case became public -- we warned about the dangers of racial profiling in his case. As events unfolded, we should have looked more searchingly at the conditions under which he was confined and the government's arguments for denial of bail.

A Fuller Accounting

In summary, we think the importance of the nuclear weapons issue to the safety and security of the nation warrants aggressive reporting and assertive, timely commentary. It is important to remember that the central figure in many of these articles had been the target of investigation for more than three years before the first pieces were published. Moreover, transfer of technology to China and nuclear weapons security had been constant government concerns throughout this period. To withhold this information from readers is an unthinkable violation of the fundamental contract between a newspaper and its audience. The only choice is to bring that information forward in news and opinion columns in a professionally careful, self-critical way.

That kind of serious journalistic effort has been expended as this case evolved, both in regard to Dr. Lee's activities and the conduct of the government's investigation. Now the tools are at hand for a fuller accounting of the entire episode, through the Senate hearings, the expected disclosures from Dr. Lee in fulfillment of his plea bargain, and Ms. Reno's recommended release of heretofore classified documents on the handling of his case.